Where's Waldo? and the Christian Life

When my children were little, we took great delight in the Where's Waldo books, which I gather were published as Where's Wally in other parts of the world. On each page there were hundreds of little figures, doing a wide variety of things, but somewhere, carefully hidden in plain sight, would be Waldo, with his easily recognized red and white shirt. It could take quite a lot of searching, but he was always there to be found.

This morning as I woke up, it occurred to me that this is like the Christian life. Sometimes we lose sight of the fact that God is there, is here in the tangled mess of our lives. Paul says in Romans 8:28 that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who are called according to his purpose. Colossians 1:17 says that in God "all things hold together." But sometimes our lives do not seem to be holding together at all, and it becomes difficult to believe that anyone, let alone an all-powerful God, is really doing anything good in them.

David and Karen Mains, in their allegorical book Tales of the Kingdom write about a magical place where the children have special days to look for the King who comes in various disguises. The boy the story follows has a hard time, because even though he is encouraged to look with his heart and not his eyes, he is not sure what that means or if he is willing to believe in anything beyond what his eyes can show him. "Seeing is believing" he says, and is told that in the Kingdom, believing is seeing. Finally he realizes that the one who has been showing up all day, as a poor beggar, as a young man delighting the children, in other guises, was actually the King.

Mother Teresa looked for Jesus, and saw him in his "distressing disguise" in the poor of the world.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, in his poem "God's Grandeur" tells us that "there lives the dearest freshness deep down things...Because the Holy Ghost over the bent world broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings."

So where will we see God today? It's a matter of looking with eyes of faith. Sometimes our problem is not having faith that He is there to be seen. Sometimes, at least for me, the problem is that we do not take the time to look carefully.